ICC25 Hard Mode: Tree Force

Who can impress upon the forest, bid the tree // unfix his earthbound root? Sweet bodements, good! — Macbeth

If Trial of the Grand Crusader taught us anything, it’s that Resto Druids can make or break fights with constant raid wide damage. This started back with Steelbreaker Last Iron Council, but we saw very clearly when working on the Twin Val’kyr that the difference between having 2 and 3 resto druids present was immense. Since then we’ve tried to carry several (generally 3) Trees to counteract deaths that occur from a combination of raid wide aura and RSTS damage. So far in ICC25 Normal and Hard mode we have only dipped below 6 healers for progression on one boss (Professor Putricide).

That’s a testament to our DPS, certainly, but a lot of combination kills can be eliminated with a lush green blanket of HoTty goodness.

There was no question about raid composition for this fight. We knew ahead of time that we definitely wanted to go in with a solid melee tank (instead of our usual warlock) and some extra healing. Blood Prince Council has absolutely no DPS check. Just like The Illidari Council, the fight is about not dieing and properly controlling the Prince’s abilities.

The Kinetic Bombs, as I described in my post about 10 man, start half as high off the ground and drop twice as fast. Therefore, if all corners of the room aren’t covered, one will drop and you will wipe. Because of this arrangement, the other abilities that the Princes cast are also immediately cancelled out.

Empowered Conjure Flame: Again, there are always going to be people near you to help soak, either healers or DPS. More than half the raid is on the opposite end of the room, making it trivial.

Shadow Prison: Only affects the melee in any significant manner. However, once they reach their destination the damage stops. Preemptively moving for targeted Shock Vortexes will certainly help.

Prince Keleseth Tank: We used a Paladin and gave him free reign to run around wherever he wanted to collect the Nuclei. At one point his shadow prison stack reached up near 55, but due to the black orbs, was taking less damage then almost everyone.

Mass Dispel > Glittering Sparks

This is a fight thrown into the “Free Loot” hard mode bucket, and I would tend to agree. Because the DPS check is non-existant, you can lean on the melee to take care of that and instruct the ranged DPS to just keep the damn balls up. There will be some adjustment to the newish abilities, but once everyone settles in the raid damage will drop considerably. Our healing setup didn’t hurt either.

3 Resto Druids. The damage over time from both movement and glittering sparks are removed with that many hots going out. Any spikes from shock Vortexes or flame orbs become very manageable.

1 Shaman: I settled into a spot on the stage. From there I helped assist with tank healing and healing the melee when they ran for the shock vortex and from boss to boss. My chain heals were basically connected to them all the time. Our hunters camped out on the stage to handle Kinetic Orbs in that area, so I was there with another healer to allow them a little bit more movement than usual.

1 Paladin: Bacon Healing for the Taldaram/Valanar Tanks

The bad news ended up being that they managed to drop every piece of loot that no one wanted. The good news is we got another Shadowfrsot Shard (bringing Dalmare’s total to somewhere around 15/50 for the Shadowmourne).

Blood Queen Lana’thelGod hates fangs

This was our primary target of the evening, and she definitely did not want to go quietly. A cool DPS check of ~220,000 awaited us. It turns out that this would be a problem, but not the biggest one.

The abilities are all the same, but hit much, much harder. Here’s the healing log from our best attempt (4.9% wipe). The second 2 links are a breakdown of the final ground phase when 16 Vampyr are active.

To put it lightly, the healing gets pretty insane after she lands for a second time. Sticky situations:

Two melee getting picked for Pact of the Darkfallen at any time

Me getting Pact of the Darkfallen since I was directing all of my chain heals at those targets or the melee.

First Pact of the Darkfallen after the second air phase. This lines up nicely with the final bite (8->16) making for some frantic healing to keep everyone up and ready to pump out the DPS.

Group 5 damage in the final 90 seconds. Everyone takes the same damage, but the healers in Group 5 get no self healing since we aren’t vampires. Going to be moving a shadow priest vampyr into this group in the future. Too bad you can’t move groups in combat anymore.

We came up about 12k raid dps short, but definitely have some adjustments ready to go for tonight’s raid to finish her off before moving on to save Dreamwalker from her Emerald Nightmare.